?Visual and quality issues were the number one complaint in Saints Row 2,? said Design Director Scott Phillips at a Saints Row: The Third postmortem at GDC on Thursday. Despite the retail performance of the second game, he explained that developer Volition couldn?t take success for granted. Producing a goofy breakout hit didn?t automatically give them the resources or insight to improve upon the game. Phillips documented how the team created a better and more cohesive experience by improving upon the last title?s tone, quality, and scope.
?How you?re going to say something can be more important than what you?re saying,? explained Phillips. Nothing could be more important for a game like Saints Row: The Third than setting the proper tone. He felt that the previous two games in the series suffered from incongruous emotional moments falling too close together ? SR2 tasked you with committing a brutal murder in cold-blood after an extended ?vehicle surfing? moment. He stated that the team on the first Saints Row ?wanted to make?an MTV music video,? but that clashed with some of the goofier missions.
Once the game?s leads decided on the tone they would like to take, they found trouble trying to communicate that to their subordinates. ?By the time Saints Row: The Third shipped, only 20% of the team had shipped a Saints Row title,? explained Phillips. ?This meant that people didn?t have that automatic knowledge of Saints Row?We had a lack of buy-in as to what the game was. People didn?t know what they were making. Is fart-in-a-jar [weapon] too far? ?I had to re-explain constantly.?
The leads responded by producing a short video featuring scenes from movies that fit the tone they were aiming for ? Hot Fuzz and Bad Boys II among others. Those that still didn?t understand found help as the team produced prototypes and pre-visualizations. This reflects the need for better communication on larger projects like SR3, something that can be time consuming and expensive to maintain.
Since the team wanted to turn their breakout-hit franchise into a AAA tent-pole release, they stepped up their playtesting on the game extensively. This was done to ensure that things were paced properly and that the ?holy-shit? setpiece moments would really blow the player away, while still keeping the moment-to-moment gameplay entertaining. All of those show-stopping moments required a significant investment of time and resources, and a designer?s imagination could have easily outpaced the ability and budget of the team. Phillips emphasized the importance of controlling the scope of SR3. Pre-visualization ? like a studio might commission a movie ? gave the team a clear idea as to what they should aim for. He showed the audience the pre-viz sequence for the game?s opening mission ? where the player robs a bank, jumps out of a plane, and parachutes back into the vehicle, then out again. The rough sequence (which featured little more than marble white, untextured models) let artists and others learn what the leads were looking for. Previously the team relied on written communication which Phillips found to be vague and prone to misunderstanding.
The proper tone and score were only discovered through trial and error. Phillips explained that for the first six months of the game?s life it starred an undercover agent infiltrating the Saints. Retooling the story caused even more confusion. For over a year the game featured an Assassin?s Creed-style parkour system that allowed the player to effortlessly leap over cars, but processing limitations forced designers to remove the system that the team had spent a great deal of time implementing.
Problems like this are an unavoidable part of game development on even the smallest titles. But the economics of scale involved in modern AAA development exponentially increase costs, and a title has to sell more to stay profitable. Though Phillips didn?t address it directly, his talk reveals why ?go big or go home? has become the mantra for hardcore console games in the past few years.
GDC 2012: Gaming?s Vanishing Middle Class
The disappearance of mid-sized developers and publishers worries associate editor Ryan Winterhalter. How is the industry preparing for the age of the very large and very small? Will innovation eventually create a new middle, or is the future filled with nothing but Call of Duty-style blockbusters?
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